In this Art of Charm podcast episode, Nick Epley, a University of Chicago professor and author of Mindwise, explains why people overestimate how well they read minds, how married couples predicted about five of twenty answers while expecting twelve, and why reaching out with genuine questions goes better than we expect.
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Key Takeaways
- Humans are the most socially sophisticated primates, yet confidence in reading other minds consistently outstrips accuracy.
- In a study of married couples, spouses predicted their partner's answers correctly about 4.9 times out of 20, better than the roughly 2.8 expected by chance, but they believed they would get about 12 right.
- Spending more time with someone raises accuracy a little, but it raises confidence faster, which creates an illusion of knowledge, especially for novel topics you have never discussed.
- Three predictable errors cause most misreads: egocentrism, stereotyping, and assuming that behavior is a simple window into someone's mind.
- In the sarcasm study, recipients got about 75% right by voice and only 56% over email, yet senders predicted around 80% accuracy and recipients about 90% in both conditions.
- People underestimate how positively others respond to deep, vulnerable questions: about a quarter of incoming MBA students said they would rather take a break, but fewer than 2% felt that way afterward.
- We focus on competence when we think about ourselves, while other people mostly judge us on warmth and trustworthiness, so a smile and a genuine question matter more than we expect.
- The spotlight effect shows that other people pay far less attention to you than you fear, and the most reliable way to close mind reading gaps is to ask directly and practice reaching out in small ways.
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Who is Nick Epley?
Nick Epley is a professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. He is a psychologist who studies how people think about the minds of others, and he describes the work as putting our intuitive psychological skills to the test in experiments. In this episode he draws on studies run with married couples at the Museum of Science and Industry, with incoming MBA students at Chicago Booth, and with participants testing sarcasm, stereotypes, and political beliefs. He credits his PhD adviser Tom Gilovich with identifying the spotlight effect. Epley also shares personal stories about his youngest daughter Lindsay and about how the research changed the way he talks with students. He says he is not on social media, and that his website, Nicholas Epley dot com, collects his papers, links to the book, and videos.
Episode Chapters
- 01:30 Why humans read minds
- 03:00 Married couples guess wrong
- 06:44 The illusion of knowledge
- 10:20 A house, not an iceberg
- 16:30 Egocentrism and the sarcasm study
- 26:10 Stereotypes and simple behavior
- 32:52 Perceived political polarization
- 38:06 Deep conversations go better
- 48:05 Warmth versus competence
- 52:39 The spotlight effect
- 55:46 Lindsay and the power of hello
- 64:59 Ask directly and build habits
Why are humans so good at thinking about other minds?
Around 01:30 in the episode
Epley explains that the ability to think about other minds is what makes humans unique, and it is tied to the size of our cerebral cortex and the large social groups we live in.
Epley begins by describing how he ended up in psychology: he says he could not find anything else to be interested in. His point is that everyone is an intuitive psychologist by birth. In daily life we constantly wonder why other people act the way they do, and professional psychology simply lets him test those instincts in experiments.
He then explains why the topic matters biologically. Across primate species, the size of the cerebral cortex relative to the rest of the brain is best predicted by the size of the social group a species lives in. Humans live in the largest social groups of any primate, which makes us the most socially sophisticated species in that group. In his words, the mind of another person is the most complicated thing we ever think about.
The discussion is careful not to say that people are hopeless at this. Epley notes that most of our judgments about other people are better than chance. If a colleague is lying in tears in the corner of your office, you can tell they are having a bad day. The trouble is that the capacity works so quickly and easily that we rarely pause to ask whether we might be wrong. A read of someone else just occurs to us as an accurate picture of the world, and that sense of effortless accuracy is where overconfidence begins.
We are the most social of all primates.
How well can married couples predict each other's answers?
Around 03:00 in the episode
Spouses in the study got about 4.9 of 20 answers exactly right, better than chance at about 2.8, but they expected to get about 12 right.
Epley describes a study run at the Museum of Science and Industry. One spouse predicted how the other would answer deep questions, such as whether they feel their family is too heavily in debt these days, or whether they would rather spend a quiet night at home than go to a party. The answers were given on a seven point scale.
The couples did better than chance. The correlation between predicted and actual answers was around 0.5, which he calls pretty good. But when it came to hitting the exact number, they got about 4.9 out of 20 right, compared with roughly 2.8 expected by chance. Before the test, they believed they would get about 12 right.
For Epley this gap is the whole story. The capacity is real and makes us the most socially sophisticated species, yet it is a very hard problem, and we are not as good at it as we think. You can make the questions easier or harder and accuracy moves up or down a little, but confidence consistently outstrips accuracy.
He defines the practical problem as the gap between what I think is on your mind and what is actually on your mind. When I believe you want one birthday gift and you want another, or I think you dislike me and you do not, that gap creates friction. When I truly know what it is like to be you, we can coordinate and cooperate beautifully. When I am slightly off, the result is social friction.
we're not as good as we think we are
Does knowing someone longer make you better at reading them?
Around 06:44 in the episode
A little, but confidence grows faster than accuracy, so people who have been together the longest are often the most overconfident, especially about new topics.
The conversation turns to a common belief: that long term partners must read each other far better than strangers do. Epley points out that the data show less of a difference than people expect, particularly for novel things that have not already been discussed. If a partner says outright that she really wants to see a play downtown this weekend, then you know. Telling is the only way we truly know what is on the mind of another person.
He explains that familiarity does help. There is a positive slope between time spent with someone and how well you know them. But what rises faster is our belief that we know the other person. The result is what psychologists call an illusion of knowledge, and it means people who have been together longest are often the most overconfident, while people who barely know each other at least admit they do not know much.
The episode connects this to everyday arguments, such as the expectation that a partner should simply know your favorite food. Moods, beliefs, and emotions shift over time, so the version of someone we carry in our heads can be out of date. Epley adds that the same bias shows up when we predict our own future minds. If an idea is perfectly clear to you today, you assume it will stay clear and skip writing it down, then find a week later that it is gone.
How well do we understand our own minds?
Around 10:20 in the episode
We can report what we think and feel, but we are poor at explaining why, so Epley compares the mind to a house we can walk through but cannot trace back to its construction.
The hosts raise the familiar iceberg image, the idea that we use only ten percent of our brains. Epley says that is a myth: we use all of our brains. The real mistake is believing we have direct access to how our minds work. Psychologists have documented since the early 1900s, and especially clearly in the 1970s, that people are pretty good at saying what they are thinking or feeling. If you ask someone whether they are happy, they can tell you.
What we are not good at is psychoanalyzing ourselves, that is, identifying what causes a feeling. The stories we tell about why we feel a certain way are inferences, not direct readouts. Someone might think they feel great because of a bright red shirt when the real cause is that they got to control the thermostat.
Epley prefers a house analogy. You can close your eyes and walk through your house, describing every room. What you cannot do is explain what the carpenters did, what the house looked like before, why a wall sits where it does, or which wall is load bearing. Similarly, he says we have access to the contents of the mind, like what is projected on a screen, but not to the causal processes behind it. Freud was right that the brain works in ways we are not aware of, but Epley says much of the rest was nonsense.
One host adds that two people walking into the same room can notice completely different things, one feeling cold and the other admiring the view, which is a reminder that perspective shapes what we assume others are paying attention to.
Why does sarcasm fail over email?
Around 16:30 in the episode
Recipients detected sarcasm about 75% of the time by voice but only 56% over email, while senders expected about 80% accuracy in both cases.
Epley explains that when we do not know someone well, using ourselves as a guide is often reasonable. If I think a room is hot or a joke is funny, you probably do too. The problem is that we cannot tell when another person's perspective differs from ours. He links this to the curse of knowledge: once you know the answer to a problem, it is hard to imagine how difficult it is for someone who does not.
To test this in communication, participants wrote 20 statements across 10 topics, with some meant to be sincere and some sarcastic. Senders predicted how many the recipients would classify correctly, and recipients made their own guesses. When people could hear the speaker, they got about 75% right. When they only read the statements over email, they got 56%, barely above chance.
The surprise is not that voice beats text. It is that the senders predicted recipients would reach about 80% accuracy regardless of whether they were talking or typing. They did not appreciate that their sarcasm was not coming through their fingers. Recipients were the most overconfident of all, believing they got about 90% right in both conditions.
Epley points out how this produces real friction: you think a teasing email is obviously a joke, the reader does not, and they get upset. The hosts note that shorthand like the slash s marker and emojis are attempts to add color to what we type. The deeper lesson is that the obvious point in the abstract is not obvious in practice, which is why we keep making the error.
He also notes that people mispredict their own future reactions in emotional situations. He recalls actor Mark Wahlberg saying after the September 11th attacks that if he had been on those planes it would not have gone down as it did, and says the best guide to how you would feel in a situation is how people actually in that situation feel.
What mistakes do we make when judging other people?
Around 26:10 in the episode
Besides egocentrism, Epley describes two more errors: using stereotypes that exaggerate group differences, and assuming behavior is a simple reflection of someone's mind.
Epley is careful to say that accuracy is nuanced. The mechanisms we use give us real insight into other minds, far beyond what other species can do, but they lead to predictable mistakes. Egocentrism is the first: a boss assumes an instruction is crystal clear because it is clear to the boss, even if it is mud to the employee.
The second is stereotyping. Once we know a little about someone, we fill in gaps using what we know about their groups. Stereotypes often contain some accuracy. You are right to be more afraid of a tiger than a rabbit, and right to expect different beliefs from a Republican than from a Democrat. The problem is that stereotypes are defined by what differentiates groups, so they exaggerate differences and miss everything the groups share. People think the empathy difference between men and women is about three times larger than it is on tests of empathy.
The third error comes from watching what someone does. If a person sitting next to you on a train does not talk to you, you infer that they do not want to talk. But they may also be waiting for you to start, even though both of you like to talk. Epley calls this intuitive behaviorism: we assume the mind behind the behavior is simpler than it really is.
In the discussion, a host notes that even a few percentage points of difference can matter at scale, such as in voting patterns. Epley agrees that small differences can matter, and that differences in the tails of two distributions can be large even when the averages are close. He mentions that Janet Hyde proposed the gender similarities hypothesis because the distributions overlap so much.
Is political polarization about different beliefs or wrong beliefs about the other side?
Around 32:52 in the episode
Epley says what has grown is perceived polarization: people increasingly misjudge how extreme the other side's beliefs are, while actual beliefs have stayed fairly stable.
Epley uses politics as a case where friction causes a real problem. Polarization has been described as increasing in the United States for roughly thirty years. But when people are asked about their own beliefs on many issues, those answers have stayed pretty much the same. What has been diverging are people's beliefs about what the other side believes.
He describes an experiment he ran for the book, roughly ten years before the interview. Participants chose between two countries, one with fairly uneven wealth distribution and one with fairly even distribution. True to stereotype, Democrats leaned toward the more equal country and Republicans toward the more uneven one, but the two groups differed by only a couple of percentage points. People thought the gap was about 50%.
His takeaway is that stereotypes can give us the direction right while getting the magnitude very wrong, and magnitude matters. If I think the other side holds extreme views, that is scary, and fear is a strong motivator.
The hosts add that holding up the extreme tail of the other side is an easy way to rally a team, because saying look how similar we are does not get people to turn out. They wonder what happens when that approach wears out, and Epley expresses a hope for more boring elections in which either candidate could drive the ship fine.
Should you go slowly when trying to connect with a stranger?
Around 38:06 in the episode
Epley's research suggests people are too reluctant to start conversations and too shallow once they begin, because deep conversations go much better than expected.
A host raises a common worry among people who want closer relationships: that you must follow a slow progression of questions, and going too fast will make the other person judge you. Epley says his team has tested intuitions like this against reality for about a decade, and they keep finding that people underestimate how positively others respond when you reach out in a positive way.
He gives examples. People are reluctant to talk to strangers on a train, bus, cab, or plane because they assume the other person is not interested, and they are wrong about that. If you smile at people, they tend to smile back, yet we look at others who are not smiling at us and conclude they do not want to. Those mistakes build barriers that can keep us lonelier than we need to be. Once conversations start, we also tend to stay overly shallow.
The clearest demonstration comes from the second day of orientation for incoming MBA students at Chicago Booth. Epley pairs students up and asks them to have a meaningful conversation using questions such as what they are most grateful for, what a new friend should know about them, one of the last times they cried in front of another person, and what they are most nervous about in the program.
Before the conversation, students predicted it would be weird and awkward. About 24 or 25% said they would rather take a break than have it. Afterward, they said it went better than expected, and fewer than 2% said they would rather have taken a break.
The hosts add that analytical, problem solving conversations are safe but do not build connection, and that sharing feelings invites the other person to share too.
What do people really judge you on when they meet you?
Around 48:05 in the episode
People evaluate others mainly on warmth, meaning trustworthiness and kindness, while we focus on our own competence, so we miss easy chances to connect.
Epley describes two main dimensions psychologists use to evaluate people. Competence covers skills, intelligence, and getting things done. Warmth covers being friendly, trustworthy, honest, and caring, and is most closely tied to morality.
The mismatch is another form of egocentrism. We take our own warmth for granted, so when we think about ourselves we are focused on the task or on saying the smart thing. Other people, however, are asking whether we are decent and trustworthy. As he puts it, when you meet someone on the street, the first thing you want to know is whether they can solve a complicated math problem or are going to kill you, and you do not care about their competence at first.
That means when you sit down for a conversation worrying about asking the wrong question, the other person is mostly wondering whether you seem nice. A smile is a simple way to show it, and people tend to talk back when you do.
A host adds a related example about how we attribute other people's behavior to ourselves. If a group of strangers snickers as you pass, you may decide it was about you, when they may be sharing a joke unrelated to you. The same happens online, where we assume a friend who seems busy and happy would not want to be bothered. These assumptions create barriers to the connection that matters for our health and well-being.
Do other people notice your embarrassing moments?
Around 52:39 in the episode
Much less than you think: in the Barry Manilow shirt study, participants expected about half the room to identify the shirt, but only chance level, about 25%, could.
Epley calls the spotlight effect the most liberating phenomenon in psychology. It was identified by his PhD adviser Tom Gilovich and describes the tendency to believe others are paying more attention to us than they really are.
In the famous experiment, college students at Cornell were asked to put on a T-shirt with a large picture of Barry Manilow before entering a room with several other students. Wearing it was a little embarrassing. After a moment, the shirt wearer was pulled out of the room and asked to predict what percentage of people in the room could identify who was on the shirt. They guessed about half.
The experimenters then asked the people in the room, using a four option multiple choice question. About 25% got it right, which is chance. In other words, nobody was paying attention.
Epley's conclusion is that you are the center of your own world, not other people's. The implication for social anxiety is that the stumble or awkward comment you keep replaying probably went unnoticed. The hosts apply it to digital life: we see polished highlights from others, such as a carefully edited podcast, and compare them with our own messy reality, which makes us hold back from reaching out. Remembering that people are not watching us as closely as we fear makes it easier to engage.
Other people don't care as much about you as you might fear that they do.
How can you practice connecting with strangers?
Around 55:46 in the episode
Epley says the only way people close these gaps is by trying: smile, say hello, and watch what happens, as his daughter Lindsay does naturally.
Asked how he applies the science in his own life, Epley introduces his youngest daughter Lindsay. She is 8 years old, was adopted from China six years earlier, and has Down syndrome. He describes her as having no filter on her hello. She greets everyone, does not worry about what they are thinking of her, and is, as far as he can tell, the most popular kid in her school.
At the grocery store, he says, people who look like they are not really there light up when she says hello, like finding a hidden switch. Seeing this repeatedly gave him the courage to try it himself.
What the research shows is that the only way people overcome these gaps is by practicing and learning where they are wrong. Telling people that conversations tend to go better than expected does not work, but having one does. He suggests trying it in small ways: the next day, smile and say hello as you walk by someone and see how many smiles you get back. In a study at the Museum of Science and Industry with Amit Kumar, people who walked around smiling and saying hello rated others in the museum as friendlier.
The hosts describe a street exercise they use with clients: collecting 50 signatures in a notebook, along with three first impression qualities from each person. Clients expect rejection and a time limit to be impossible, but come back early, having learned that strangers were more helpful than predicted. Epley names this the underestimation of compliance effect. He also tells of a former PhD student who feared nobody would complete her dissertation surveys and was basically never rejected.
What is the simplest way to know what someone else is thinking?
Around 64:59 in the episode
Ask them. Epley says he now guesses less and asks more, and he suggests turning kind social actions into small, concrete habits.
Epley says the research changed his own behavior in two ways. First, he guesses much less about what is on someone's mind and asks much more, which gets to depth right away. With students, he does not guess how they are doing; he asks. When someone is going through a hard time, he says he no longer hesitates to ask directly and sincerely, including about self harm, as therapists advise, because he knows that is how he will find out and that people tend to be open when asked directly.
Second, he applies the idea that behaviors need to become habits to be sustainable, something he says was described in a well known book about habits. Simply resolving to be kinder will not work, but a small, concrete habit can. His own example is passing along compliments he hears third parties give about someone: when he hears a nice thing said, he tells the person who was praised. It has become automatic.
He adds that social behaviors have an advantage over something like exercise, because they tend to feel good right away. Reaching out and connecting with other people is pretty nice.
At the end of the episode, Epley says he is not on social media because of social comparison, but his website, Nicholas Epley dot com, has his papers, links to the book, and videos and podcasts he has done.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Nick Epley?
Nick Epley is a professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. He is a psychologist who runs experiments on how people think about other minds. On The Art of Charm podcast he discusses mind reading, overconfidence, deep conversations, and the spotlight effect.
What did Nick Epley say about reading minds on The Art of Charm podcast?
He said humans are the most socially sophisticated primates and are better than chance at reading others, but our confidence outstrips our accuracy. Married couples in his study got about 4.9 of 20 answers right and expected about 12. The most reliable way to know what someone thinks is to ask them directly.
What is the spotlight effect according to Nick Epley?
It is the tendency to believe other people are paying more attention to us than they really are. In the Barry Manilow shirt experiment described in the episode, wearers expected about half the room to identify the shirt, but only about 25%, which is chance, did. Epley calls it liberating, since other people care less about you than you fear.
Why do deep conversations go better than we expect?
Epley says people underestimate how positively others respond when we reach out with genuine interest. In his MBA student exercise, about a quarter said beforehand they would rather take a break, but fewer than 2% felt that way afterward, and they reported the conversations went far better than they predicted.
Why does sarcasm get misread over email?
In Epley's study, recipients detected sarcasm about 75% of the time when they could hear the speaker but only 56% over email. Senders expected about 80% accuracy either way, and recipients believed they got about 90% right. People do not realize that the medium changes how well their intent comes through.
What are the three errors Nick Epley says we make when reading minds?
Epley describes egocentrism, which means assuming other people see things as we do, stereotyping, which exaggerates group differences while missing what groups share, and intuitive behaviorism, which assumes someone's behavior is a simple reflection of their mind. Each gives some accuracy but produces predictable mistakes.
How can I practice connecting with strangers, according to the episode?
Epley suggests trying it in small ways: smile and say hello to someone as you walk by and notice how many people smile back. He says that telling people conversations go well does not change beliefs, but trying it does. He also suggests small, concrete social habits, such as passing along compliments you hear.
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